I am wondering, do you keep your students in the form of the boring essay, adding only the new elocution skills?
I have not done this, but am curious to know what others are doing/have done/designed to be done. I required one to two boring essays, depending on age and previous writing skill. After this, we have continued to write essays, but I have asked them to go ahead and write a bit more "naturally" and include some variety and further detail as needed.
I have required all of them to keep a master essay (in a labeled page protector so they are clear on what it is-no more "which essay?", "I don't remember what the master essay is"...) It is with this master essay that they begin work on new concepts-for example they add parallelism to this essay first, then they work on another essay at home with parallelism (and this essay done at home is more detailed, varied, interesting than the master essay.)
Leah, I don't know what I ought to be doing, but I did not require "boringness" after the first essay. My sixth-grader's essays are still pretty boring for the most part, but the older two are writing more interesting essays. My senior even instinctively added a bit of an amplification to her last essay before I'd taught it, but I didn't make her take it out and redo the conclusion (partly because it tied in so well with the quote she'd used for her exordium).
I like your idea of a master essay. We have a "master issue," and we keep adding to the ANI and outline of that as we learn new invention and arrangement skills, but we haven't worked it into an essay that we could use to practise the elocution skills as well. I think we will have to do that next time we're doing an elocution lesson.
